Quote from: MPOE-PR on December 15, 2012, 11:23:46 PM

Quote from: creativex on December 15, 2012, 08:47:27 PM

I'm more interested in why anyone in authority at BFL would allow a company officer to post attack after attack on the most important forum that's relevant to their business.

Ok, now say that with a straight face.

Quote from: greyhawk on December 15, 2012, 08:55:06 PM

You know how the Nigerians specifically prepare their 419 scams to be as outrageously absurd and stupid as possible in the attempt to appeal only to the very naive and to not waste time with people calling out their scam.

Indeed, good Sir Greyhawk, you may be on to something there.

Quote from: elux on December 15, 2012, 08:53:20 AM

Quote from: Inaba on December 15, 2012, 02:33:50 AM

Quote from: DutchBrat on December 15, 2012, 12:28:13 AM

Seeing as Josh's role is Public Relations / Investor Relations and not head of slicing and packaging I find it hard to believe that he was left out of the loop on that one. Seems in his role at BFL he should be made aware of all those pesky little details....

PS - My job is not PR or investor relations, which is why I don't coddle idiots like Frizz and PuertoLibre when they display their stupidity over and over. If I were the PR guy, I'd have to tell them warm fuzzies and make them feel good about themselves. Thankfully, my job is much different and it involves firing "customers" like Frizz et al because they cost far more than they generate in revenue and we do not want them as customers. Ever.

That does make sense. If you don't intend to deliver, ever.

Quote from: Microsoft Research

Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is
to get those who possess this quality to self-identify. An
email with tales of fabulous amounts of money and West
African corruption will strike all but the most gullible
as bizarre. It will be recognized and ignored by anyone
who has been using the Internet long enough to have
seen it several times. It will be figured out by anyone
savvy enough to use a search engine and follow up on
the auto-complete suggestions such as shown in Figure
8. It wont be pursued by anyone who consults sensible
family or fiends, or who reads any of the advice banks
and money transfer agencies make available. Those who
remain are the scammers ideal targets. They represent
a tiny subset of the overall population. In the language
of our analysis the density of viable victims, d, is very
low: perhaps 1-in-10,000 or 1-in-100,00 or fewer will fall
for this scam.

As weve seen, in Section 3.3, at low victim densi-
ties the attack/dont attack decisions must be extremely
conservative. If only 0.00001% of the population is vi-
able then mistakenly attacking even a small portion of
the 99.999% of the population that is non-viable de-
stroys profit. The initial email is effectively the at-
tackers classifier: it determines who responds, and thus
who the scammer attacks (i.e., enters into email con-
versation with). The goal of the email is not so much
to attract viable users as to repel the non-viable ones,
who greatly outnumber them. Failure to repel all but a
tiny fraction of non-viable users will make the scheme
unprofitable. The mirth which the fabulous tales of
Nigerian scam emails provoke suggests that it is mostly
successful in this regard. A less outlandish wording that
did not mention Nigeria would almost certainly gather
more total responses and more viable responses, but
would yield lower overall profit. Recall, that viability
requires that the scammer actually extract money from
the victim: those who are fooled for a while, but then
figure it out, or who balk at the last hurdle are precisely
the expensive false positives that the scammer must deter.
In choosing a wording to dissuade all but the likeliest
prospects the scammer reveals a great sensitivity
to false positives.
...
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=167719
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf